Nazareth's Song (28 page)
“Looks like you’re going to the bank,” she said.
“Appears I am.” Jeb smiled.
“If you don’t mind my suggesting that I give you a ride, we can ride together. I’ve been wanting to share something with you. But with all the goings-on at the church, we’ve had little privacy lately.”
“Long’s I can drive. Don’t look right for you to be driving me around.”
They had driven within a mile of Marvelous Crossing Bridge when Winona leaned toward Jeb and kissed the side of his face. Then she said, “I saw Fern Coulter at Honeysack’s at the crack of dawn. She scarcely said two words to me. Have you noticed she’s been acting kind of funny lately? Not to gossip, but she’s never been the most friendly person in Nazareth.”
Jeb had noticed Fern leaving church earlier than usual the last couple of weeks. “Fern’s got her own ways. I quit trying to figure her out long ago.”
“She’s not from around here and that may have something to do with it. Oklahoma people have their own ways. We have ours.”
“I don’t suppose you drove all the way over from your place to talk about Fern Coulter.” For some reason, Winona’s questions about Fern irritated him.
“You’re starting to know me better than myself, Jeb. I have a letter here with some news about that family in Pine Bluff.”
Jeb could not recall what family in Pine Bluff, but his irritation kept him from commenting.
“Now all of this came about after I had scarcely mentioned to my friend from out of town that you might be looking for a home for the Welby children. I hadn’t even thought of it at all myself because that’s your business, and you clearly said you weren’t interested. And that’s final as far as I’m concerned. But yesterday this letter came, and this family is looking for a little girl Ida May’s age. They are willing to take all three children just so they can have a little girl like Ida May.” She waited a moment as if for Jeb to comment and then added, “I think that speaks well of them.”
“Winona, I know Angel’s had her problems, but with the Hopper boy out of the picture, she’s settled down a tolerable amount. Packing her and Willie and Ida May off with strangers might upset the applecart for these kids, so to speak.”
“I knew you’d say that. But you’ve not exactly been yourself, what with taking over the minister’s role here at Church in the Dell. Who can blame you for not being able to think straight? You look worn out all the time, up at dawn visiting sick people. Up at all hours with farmers and sick cows and women in labor. Then to have to take care of someone else’s children on top of all that. I mean, if they were your own, then certainly I could see you doting on them. But that oldest girl shows little respect for you, and don’t think these loose-tongued women don’t notice it. She doesn’t understand your role like Emily Gracie understood her daddy’s place in the community. You’d never hear her up at the town Woolworth’s spouting off about her daddy.”
Winona covered her mouth with her hand. The longer she spoke, the more the momentum of her subject carried her further into a kind of unwitting anxiety.
“Angel’s been spouting off at the Woolworth’s about me?”
Winona fell as silent as snow.
“You already told me, Winona, so you may as well spill it out.”
“To hear her tell it, you conspired against the Hoppers.”
“Angel said that in front of everybody?”
“If everybody is the town mayor, the school headmaster, the man that sweeps up the streets, and the apple hawker on the corner near Woolworth’s.”
Angel had been so polite of late that Jeb thought she had finally let go of the Hoppers.
“It wasn’t my intent to tell you all that, just the part about the Pine Bluff family. She’ll hate me now more than ever. You can’t tell her, Jeb.”
“Angel doesn’t hate you.”
“Last Sunday she sidled past me down the church aisle and the look she gave me would melt nails.”
Jeb had believed that things between them were on the mend. He also thought of how he could have left her behind in Little Rock to be pecked on by the hungry buzzards devouring her Aunt Kate and her wretched brood. Angel had yet to appreciate the life he had given her. “Let me see that letter from Pine Bluff, Winona.”
Winona pulled the letter from her handbag, but then hesitated. “I feel awful about all of this.”
Jeb slid the letter out of her hand. “What time is dinner again?”
“Friday night at seven. Unless sooner is better.” She slid out a stick of gum and snapped her bag closed.
“The sooner the better,” said Jeb. It seemed easier to embrace the new life in front of him than to try to keep piecing together the mess from the past. “We’re driving to Hope, if that’s all right with you. There’s a new place that’s open for dinner. I’ll pick you up Friday night at six.”
A logging truck hugged the side of the road. The driver caught sight of Jeb and Winona approaching in the rearview mirror and then, letting out a gaseous stream from the growling engine, rolled forward. Jeb saw the three newly employed men sitting on top of the freshly cut timber like monkeys with their cups full of pennies. He laughed. “There’s a sight for sore eyes.”
He’d deal with Angel tonight.
Angel had settled back into the parsonage as though she’d never left it. She had pinned up magazine pictures of movie stars in a frame around the window. She leaned against a picture of Claudette Colbert. She closed her eyes and held her breath.
Jeb pounded against the door. It was only a matter of minutes until he dismantled the lock from the outside and threw open the door. “Angel, you may as well unlock the door! Hiding yourself won’t help matters!”
Angel huffed and finally marched to the door and turned the lock. She kept her back to Jeb as he marched in behind her. “You aren’t listening, so what’s the point?”
“In front of the mayor, the whole town, you trashed my name. I’m the preacher of these people, and you go off half cocked because of some silly boy crush. This is serious, Angel. I shouldn’t have to explain about reputation to you. You’re old enough to know better!”
“I barely said anything at all and to one person. If it was carried further, is it my fault?”
“So you mouthed off down at the Woolworth’s?”
“I know you think things is going right for you, Jeb. But you’re just blind to matters. The Hoppers are gone, and now you don’t have to see the hurt in Mrs. Hopper’s eyes or think about the way she feels when she can’t feed herself or her kids at suppertime. You don’t see because you made it all go away! I remember a day when you saw people like the Hoppers as humans instead of trash.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things have gotten better for Church in the Dell, not worse, and not just for us. This town’s lumbermill is up and working. They’s a whole new timber operation settling down right here in Nazareth and I for one am proud to be part of it. The Hoppers were in a fix, yes, but Asa had too much pride to let anyone help. Now he’s in prison, and his family’s been put out, but I didn’t put them there. You’re taking on confusion like a leaky boat takes on water, Angel.”
“Beck told me he’d write when they settled, and it’s been a whole month. If they’ve broken down along the road somewhere with no one to help them, we’d never know.”
“What do you expect me to do? Go driving up and down the road hollering out Hopper’s name and hope to find them?”
“You shouldn’t have let them leave, Jeb.”
“None of this matters a hill of beans anymore, Angel. Some people are beyond help. I have a church to run, bills to pay, and a flock that needs tending. This church was dying when we came. Remember? Now it’s a fine little place with a congregation and respectability.”
“Maybe I don’t know much about preachering, but this kind of respectability don’t sound like something God would take to.” Angel fell back onto her bed and brought her hands up over her face.
“Angel, I need to tell you something. I know we’ve had our differences, but I’ve always loved you, Willie, and Ida May.” He hesitated, not knowing if he should deal the next hand.
Angel sat up and at once read his expression. He saw anxiety suddenly wash over her face. She pulled her knees against her chest and swallowed hard. “If it’s an apology you’re wanting, I’m sorry for what I said at the Woolworth’s, Jeb.”
“They’s a family in Pine Bluff that’s been looking for a little girl to call their own. A girl Ida May’s age—”
“You’re not sending Ida May off, Jeb, without me! She’d be scared to death.”
“They’re willing to take all three of you.” Jeb pulled the letter from his trouser pocket.
She stared at him for the length of time it would take for a trapped bug to measure the marvel of a web and then said, “You can’t throw us out!” She wiped the tears from her cheeks, angry. “If this is the way it is, Jeb, then why didn’t you leave me in Little Rock?”
“This will give you the momma and daddy you been needing. I can’t do for you in the manner you need anymore, Angel. You’re bullheaded and I just keep giving in. I don’t want you to end up like your cousin Effie.”
“I hate you!”
“Why you want to make me feel like a louse? I’m trying to do right by you. Thousands of youngens are out wandering the roads, and you got a family that wants you, Angel. They can care for you and make sure you stay out of trouble. With a good family you can make something of yourself.”
“If I won’t go, neither will Willie or Ida May. They do as I say.”
“Ida May needs a momma, not a dictator.”
“You was mean when I met you, and you’re mean still! Nothing’s changed about you, Jeb Nubey. You might wear better things now or part your hair different, but you is still the same mean man that crawled into Nazareth rain soaked and looking for a free meal ticket. All you’ve done is trade people like the Hoppers like you’re trading a mule. You get respectability and anyone in your way gets the boot!” She hid her face in her pillow and sobbed.
Jeb took a deep breath but didn’t answer her. The whole matter of Angel left his heart stranded on a bad stretch of road.
J
eb took a shovel to the thin sheet of ice that had formed overnight on the rear porch steps. When he put away the shovel, he found the crawl-space door ajar. A raccoon had most likely found its way beneath the church for warmth and to forage for a midnight meal. Jeb stuck his head into the musty space. A three-foot spread of potatoes had frozen. He raked out the damaged tubers and piled them into a burlap bag.
When he stomped into the church, his muttering brought a loud laugh from the front. He looked up, surprised to find he wasn’t alone. “Fern.”
“I’m glad it’s me standing back here and not Florence Bernard. She might mistake your muttering for swearing.”
Jeb tried to apologize.
“I like that about you. You always make me laugh.”
Jeb took off his hat and grabbed the broom. The new floor required a good sweeping every other morning, and it gave him a reason not to look Fern square in the eyes. When he’d first seen her standing in the light from the windows, he’d had to jolt his memory so that he could even remember why he was supposed to be angry with her. “Could I help you this morning, Fern? Or did you drop by casually to poke fun? he thought.
“If you’d give me the chance, I’d like to call a truce.”
Jeb recalled the scene in the library, remembering the manner in which she had described him to her uppity friend from school that afternoon. He stiffened. “You probably think someone of my caliber has time for chitchat. That’s understandable. I know my reputation with you.” He swallowed and continued. “My eyes have been opened to a lot of things this past year, including how you feel about me.” He swiped a cobweb off the wall with the broom, but kept looking at her, ready for one of her snappy comebacks.
“Since I’ve taken to teaching only the lower school and tutoring an hour after school, I have an hour now between my two morning classes. I noticed Angel was not her usual self. Downright surly, if you ask me. I thought now would be a good time to ask you about her.” She was refusing his argument, elevating herself above him again.
“That’s another thing. You think because you and me once had—that we were once,
nearly,
anyway—that you can put your hands in things that don’t concern you.”
Fern turned ashen. “I should leave.”
“I realize that I’m not the best substitute daddy in the world for the Welbys, but I’ve made do the best I can.”
“No one can argue the fact.”
“What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to be so involved in the Welbys’ lives anymore. Like coming over every Sunday to button Ida May’s dress and making biscuits for the kids.” The more he talked, the more sickened he felt. While his intent had been to defend himself, the result had hurt the woman he could never quite shake from his thoughts.
“No one makes me do that. I do it because I like it.”
“Angel’s big enough to do that. You might see things turn better between the two of you if you’d back off.” His voice quivered.
Fern stiffened. She opened her handbag and pulled out a handkerchief. Then her eyes lifted to Jeb. “I can see,” she said, “that I’ve only made things worse.”
Jeb felt the broom handle fall from his hands. He saw her tears and the way the corners of her eyes turned down as she saw something in him that pricked down deep into her soul and left her without words. Fern was never at a loss for words until he had gone too deep with the blade. Come to think of it, he had never known the plumbing depths of any woman’s threshold for hurt, let alone Fern’s. That was kind of a nuisance with which he had learned to live.
She gave in to him by saying nothing at all. Jeb wanted to swear at himself for hurting her. He tried to find the words to say how sorry he was for being the backside of a mule. But all he could do was watch her turn from him, like the last leaf falling from the last branch in November. As hard as he tried to mine Fern from his heart, the farther she became embedded.
“I’m sorry I interrupted your work, Reverend.”
“Could you tell me your reason for coming?” he choked out.
“To invite you to dinner Friday night.”
Jeb remembered his date with Winona, but nothing would make him tell her. “I wouldn’t be good company, Fern.” He felt as if he were choking.
